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COMMENT
30
The Architect’s Newspaper March 25, 2015
jeremy mende
Comment> pierluigi Serraino and John Marx
Our heads are spinning between
bombastic statements about
fantasies of mass-customization
and the sadistic warping of unitized
systems to adapt to predetermined
forms, the wilder the better.
Both camps operate without a
working understanding of the role of
emotional meaning in architecture.
Emotional Meaning: The
Intangible of Architecture
SETTING THE STAGE
Remember the last time you
changed your route to stop and visit
a particular building? You may have
wanted to see it for some time;
perhaps it was a curiosity or a
tribute to your student days. Imagine
you are there, entering the realm of
its presence with all the particularities
of your own life. That architecture
is inevitable, substantive, impactful,
consequential, and undeniably
timeless. Still, in its beauty, the
construction is a mute messenger
of the larger order of things that
you sense within, but are unable to
declare. This artifact is the resonance
chamber of all that is uncontainable
within you. What you are seeing,
occupying, savoring—in a word
experiencing—is emotionally
meaningful. We hold this to be
a primary aspiration in the making
of architecture. Emotional meaning
aids in reconnecting the inner and
outer dimensions of our world.
When avant-garde modernists
chose to prize reason over emotion,
architecture detached itself from
the world it was meant to improve.
The cold rationality of performance
and concept-based design left out
the intangibles that make us human.
Estrangement followed.
Design without rigor inexorably
turns capricious. On the other
hand, design without heart lays out
urban cemeteries. When rigor and
heart are balanced, they infuse the
CA/MW_03_24_32_SL.indd 8
city fabric with a sense of place.
Bonding and belonging ensue.
Emotional meaning in architecture
occurs when the elements or
the character of a space arouse
an emotional response in the
user that is meaningful, significant,
and enduring.
In an attempt to understand
the structural relationship between
architecture and people, can emotions
be conceived as a cognitive basis
for design rather than being hastily
dismissed as personal opinions?
It is within reason to say that few
members of the public experience
an emotional connection to today’s
architecture. Design as problem
solving often neglected this aspect,
producing an ecosystem out of
balance and fraught with undesirable
consequences. The ascetic restraint
of Miesian descent brought, and still
brings, chilling austerity to the global
urban imagery. Broadly speaking,
current design tends to fall into
two trends: sanitized glass-boxes
rooted in a mid-century modern
revival or Wild West formalism with
fashionable architecture on stylistic
overload. Either way, we are facing
a particularly aggressive challenge
on the emotional meaning front.
Pervasive computing has enabled
reckless self-indulgence from those
architects married to innovation
no matter what, whose formal
language has imploded under the
pressure of originality at all cost.
WHERE WE WERE. WHERE WE ARE.
The 20th century saw the hard
sciences triumphant. Yet something
went profoundly wrong. Calculus
proved to be a defective instrument
in solving the intractable problems
pertaining to the broader human
equation. Urban blight, one of
the copious global scars of relentless
industrialization, is the most
discernible outcome of an engineering
logic left unchecked. It is ubiquitous,
inevitable, and of overwhelming
magnitude. It stands as the deformed
child of the unhappy union between
mathematical reasoning operating
on autopilot and design processes
rooted in declarative procedures
with no human insight. Obsession
with problem solving, on material
“honesty,” on the social overpowering the formal, and on the fetishizing
of technology for technology’s sake
has lead to the general public’s
alienation from architecture.
Thinking took over from feeling.
The humanities got the short end of
the stick. It would be all well and
good if individuals were machines,
but we know that to be untrue.
Still we have yet to bear witness
to a change in outlook. It is our
contention that emotion links
environments to their users and
is fundamental to the architectural
experience. Its role in architectural
discourse is not just desirable,
but necessary, as it would greatly
expand the capacity of architects to
symbolically reach the people they
claim to design for. As buildings
over time undergo changes in
how they embody programmatic
requirements, they remain vehicles
for the renewal of emotional meaning.
While a ubiquitous response,
emotion’s specific realization is
anything but universal. It differs
in every person. The fact that two
individuals can experience opposite
emotional meaning in the same
structure establishes a common
ground between them even in the
face of this polarity.
Where did the resistance to
emotions as a design factor come
from? Terminology might have
something to do with this discursive
impasse. Some words, like beauty,
can be so historically charged that
their association with what are
held as outmoded notions or past
memories must be erased in
the formative processes of new
generations. Today we hear that
customers have turned into “guests,”
and employees are “dismissed” as
opposed to being unceremoniously
fired. What semantic transformations
have “emotions” undergone in the
patois of the highbrow crowd of the
crowding the arena of our sedated
perception:
The Nostalgic: a sentimental
longing for a past period, which is
romanticized through the artistic
artifacts of that era. The fallacy of
nostalgia is that when the conditions
that produced the artifacts no longer
exist and the human condition has
progressed from that point in time,
this past loses its relevance and can
no longer be credibly recreated.
The Superficial: the cult of the
physique. The superficial is still the
focus of normative notions of beauty.
Appearance over content is the
quintessential antinomy of this
ideal. Rather than being a popularity
contest, architecture aims at longerterm values.
The Commercial: unrestrained
consumerism and transient
gratification. When the primary
purpose of the design of an object
is to pander to the base instincts of
a group in order to maximize sales,
the end result is most often products
that are shallow and short-lived.
The Inauthentic: something that
is not of its time; something that is
untrue to the conditions and nature
of its time, material, or technology;
something that appears to be what
it is not.
Emotional meaning alone is not
the basis of design; but its absence
renders architecture without merit.
It is the inscrutable raison d’être
that links the act of building to
the sublimation of the inner self;
a mixture of pleasure, bliss, and
rootedness. The physiology of the
body starts registering the presence
of an artifact designed with intent
to go beyond the circumstantial
practicalities of the program. It is
A WAY FORWARD
intelligible in its nuanced aspirations,
Emotional meaning supplies
while providing the bond to hold the
architects with the capacity to
personal blocks that form the whole
discern the priceless against the
of humanity. Emotional meaning
dispensable. Bringing it back into
stirs catharsis to the collective and
the broader dialog is especially
that unfathomable togetherness
useful given how participatory
that resets individuals’ unwavering
design has taken renewed hold as commitment to kinship. This is
we go deep into the 21st century.
territory foreign to rational planning,
Finally, the faceless stakeholders
the quicksand of engineering analysis.
get their seat at the design table
This reflection is presented to
sharing the entries until now in
jumpstart a conversation within the
the hands of financial and program architecture community. In weaving
driven clients. Emotional meaning
emotions back into the evaluation
will add its weight into the balance criteria, we are advocating for a
mix to cater long-term to the
disciplined practice of design where
community in factual ways.
the metaphysical layer that always
Emotional Meaning matters now existed in architecture, whether in
for the following reasons:
religious or secular centuries, can find
It helps to re-establish the
an explicit and sustainable resolution
general public’s trust and affection into a material arrangement
toward architects.
that speaks to the concerns and
It constitutes an opportunity to
emotional bandwidth of 21st century
inhabitants. In pursuing a much
reengage clients to the value of tighter fit than ever before between
architecture.
form and emotion, architects can
It resets the architect’s outlook
to design with people and art as in once again exercise their capacity to
dissoluble essentials of architecture. steer society toward the realization
of their current understanding of
Ever cognizant of the failures of
the past—like the use of emotions citizenship, well-being, and healthy
participation of community members
for the opportunistic to legitimize
into the public realm.
their designs and populate the
environment with the unsightly—
John Marx and Pierluigi Serraino
a starting list would include the
are authors and architects who
following four offenders, guilty of
live in the Bay Area.
past 40 years? Given the secular
nature of 20th century culture and
beyond, emotions are perilously
evocative of faded romanticism,
signposts of irrelevant concerns
to what today’s gatekeepers of
architectural discourse deem to be
currency. They dispose of emotions
as annoying, sentimental yearnings
unsuitable to the blueprint of cultural
and societal reformation that the
promoters of modern and postmodern architecture have endorsed.
Our critics offer an array of alternative
idioms to talk effectively about the
same notion. A glaring example
is the tragic anonymity of Silicon
Valley. As visitors, we cannot help
wondering what the root cause is
for the inverse relationship between
unparalleled financial wealth and the
deterioration of the urban condition
in the same territory. Design platitude
is all around us. It is the malaise
of our time and exclusively of our
own making.
Form-making by itself is an
empty exercise, negating the
qualitative function of architecture in
human existence. Self-expression,
on the other hand, is the filtering
of circumstances and contingency
through the sensibility of an
individual, resonating with the
socio-physical character of the site.
Rationality alone cannot resolve
the conflicts between these two
seemingly opposite points of view.
Hyper-focus on the physical metrics
of the human body, e.g. design
based on human scale handbooks,
or equation-based design, e.g.
parametric architecture, are likely
shortcuts to a space of collective
alienation.
3/17/15 4:11 PM